Chapter 11 examines the steps needed to rescue Brandt’s Ostpolitik from its near-demise at the hands of a polarized Bundestag. Following a rash of back-channel diplomacy with Egon Bahr at the center, France, Britain, the United States, and the USSR finally reached a Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin; it guaranteed access to the city but failed to clarify West Berlin’s relationship to the Federal Republic, leaving room for future disputes. Brandt’s surprise visit to Brezhnev in Crimea deepened the relationship between these two leaders, but created suspicion in the Western camp that did not ease even with Brandt’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize. Rainer Barzel, leader of the CDU/CSU, insisted that the Warsaw and Moscow treaties must be renegotiated; he maneuvered in the Bundestag to overthrow the Brandt government. Outside observers feared that the entire course of détente was in jeopardy. Barzel’s bid for power failed, but he continued to seek concessions from the Soviets; the GDR did briefly take a softer line. The treaties passed without CDU/CSU support, and Brandt went on to win a decisive victory in the 1972 elections, affirming public backing for Ostpolitik.

This chapter discusses central features of 1980s global human rights culture by discussing the political impact and the symbolism of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize for the Polish trade union leader Lech Wałęsa. On the one hand, the chapter shows, the Prize helped keep Wałęsa and human rights violations on the international agenda. It inducted the Polish labor activist into a pantheon of unassailable icons of the global struggle for human rights. On the other hand, however, the rhetoric surrounding the Prize flattened the domestic politics of Wałęsa's struggle. The mass movement he was a member of and the material and political goals for which it struggled were collapsed into a stylized image of Wałęsa as someone struggling for transcendent values. This turned him and his movement into an empty signifier which political actors from the West could claim for different, even contradictory projects, as the chapter demonstrates by showing how both US Cold Warriors and West German peace activists claimed Wałęsa as an ally of their political projects.

Chapter 8 looks at the putative ‘breakthrough‘ of human rights in the 1970s, both in terms of the proliferation of activist organisations and their greater impact on governments. Beginning with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Amnesty International, the chapter then looks more widely at the events of the 1970s and Amnesty’s growth. Although the membership of the British Section did not expand as rapidly as that of some other national sections, Amnesty represented a model of activism that many other organisations sought to emulate. These included Index on Censorship and the Minority Rights Group. By the later 1970s attempts were being made to organise the ‘field of human rights‘ into loose organisational networks.